The oddity is that a guilty Mr. Bromgard might have been released well before the innocent one, because the justice system is built on the premise that a defendant's acknowledgment of guilt mitigates his culpability. But should it?

''Remorse is extremely interesting in some ways,'' said Paul H. Robinson, a law professor at Northwestern University. ''It is the only factor that does not exist at the time of the offense that seems clearly to affect our intuition about the blameworthiness of the offender.''

The federal sentencing guidelines codify this intuition. They allow sentence reductions to a defendant who ''clearly demonstrates acceptance of responsibility for his offense.''

Put another way, the innocent receive additional punishment for telling the truth.

Calvin C. Johnson Jr. was sentenced to life in a Georgia prison for a rape he did not commit. He served 16 years before he was released in 1999, after being cleared by DNA evidence.

Mr. Johnson attended some therapy sessions for sex offenders, which he said he found humiliating, but he would not sign a document admitting guilt. Such an admission, the authorities told him, was crucial to the therapy. The parole board deferred Mr. Johnson's request for release several times.

''Every time you come up for parole,'' he said, ''they set you down for a little bit longer and say it would be beneficial to take the program.'' One counselor told him, he recalled, that ''if you don't take that program, you're never going to get out.''

The advice struck Mr. Johnson as perverse.

''A guilty person has a better chance of walking out and getting parole than an innocent person,'' he said. ''It's completely twisted.''

The cases of Mr. Bromgard and Mr. Johnson are regrettable anomalies, said Professor Robinson, who believes that candid self-assessment is essential to both therapy and penal rehabilitation. And there are other reasons for insisting on an acceptance of guilt, legal experts said.

''One of the justifications for criminal punishment is the just-desserts view,'' said Scott E. Sundby, a professor at Washington and Lee School of Law. Under this view, ''what your moral culpability is will determine the punishment society extracts.''

A second justification is the possibility of rehabilitation. ''To the extent someone is not showing remorse, there is more of a sense that the person is hopeless,'' Professor Sundby said.

A third is deterrence. A person who is not remorseful is presumed more likely to commit further crimes.

Three of the five teenagers convicted in the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park steadfastly maintained their innocence at parole board hearings. Another man's confession and DNA evidence have now cast doubt on their guilt.

In a 1995 decision, the parole board declined to release one of the teenagers, Kevin Richardson. ''Subject continues to deny his guilt and does not demonstrate remorse for these brutal and senseless crimes,'' the decision said of Mr. Richardson. ''In consideration of the aforementioned, parole is denied.''

JUVENILES are particularly ill-served by the insistence on remorse, said Jeffrey A. Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University.

''He slouches. He squirms. He's wearing funky clothing. The kid is scared,'' he said. ''Kids probably don't have the expressive tools to adequately convey remorse even when they feel it, and yet it's held against them at sentencing.''

''I don't think, having talked to a lot of jurors, that one could feign remorse and get away with it,'' Professor Sundby said.

Dr. Sanford L. Drob, a forensic psychologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York, testified about the mental state of Darrel K. Harris, who was tried for murder in the first capital case in New York after the reinstatement of its death penalty in 1995. He told the jury about the remorse Mr. Harris felt, but the defendant himself did not take the stand.

Some jurors who sentenced Mr. Harris to death later told his lawyers that this was an issue. (In July, New York's highest court upheld the conviction but vacated the death penalty.)

''If they had just heard him say that he was sorry,'' Dr. Drob said of the jurors, ''they would have spared him from the death penalty.''

In fact, analyzing 37 cases in California where juries were asked to impose the death penalty, Professor Sundby found that death sentences were significantly more frequent where defendants denied their guilt.

''Confession,'' he concluded, ''is good for more than just the soul.''